Peer Index Is "Worth Watching"

I've been following Peer
Index for a month or so. Peer Index is attempting to "help
you discover the authorities and opinion formers on a given
topic."

The idea is to use the world of social media (blogs, twitter,
facebook, linkedin, etc) to determine who are the "authorities
and opinion formers" on the web.

I like the idea. The execution is the hard part. When I first
tried it out about a month ago, I thought the service was too
thin. Too few topics and too few "authorities" in each topic.

Sometime in the past week or so, they added a bunch of new
topics and a lot
more authorities in each topic. And they've added a bunch of new
ways to navigate the service. I like where they are headed with
this.

In a perfect world, you could enter literally any topic, like
"sushi in london" and find out who the experts are. Then you
could follow them, read their opinions on the topic, and possibly
even contact them.

In order to reach that perfect world, I think they are going to
need to open this up. Let the "crowd" source the topics and the
authorities and then use their algorithms and systems to maintain
the topics and rankings. At least that is my gut on how this
would work best.